


i wanna wake up where your love is

by Flowerparrish



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Aromantic Natasha Romanov, F/M, M/M, Multi, Polyamory, Relationship Negotiation, because how else are you going to navigate feelings between three people?, but just as important, people communicate like actual adults, trust is a different kind of love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-03
Updated: 2019-01-03
Packaged: 2019-10-03 09:41:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17281664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/pseuds/Flowerparrish
Summary: Clint falls halfway in love and then back out with pretty much every person who treats him even halfway decently or makes any overture of friendship. He’s done this with pretty much every Avenger by now, fallen not quite in love but past the simplicity of a crush with Steve’s stubbornness, Tony’s veiled kindness and humor, Thor’s booming laugh, Sam’s warmth, Bruce’s quiet and comforting presence. So when he fell half in love with Bucky the first time he saw him shoot on the range (he has a competence kink a mile wide and he’s not ashamed of it), he didn’t think twice about it. Without exception, the feelings always faded into the warmth of friendship and found-family, and it never mattered that for a few weeks Clint had to control himself so he didn’t follow the object of his affection around with hearts in his eyes.-In which Clint is happily dating Natasha when he realizes he's (also) in love with Bucky Barnes.





	i wanna wake up where your love is

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ClaraxBarton](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaraxBarton/gifts).



Clint and Natasha are sparring in the gym when it happens. Steve and Bucky are sparring across the room, and Clint catches a glance of Bucky catching a punch from Steve and using his grip on Steve’s arm to throw him up over his shoulder and onto his back behind him, sees a brief, somewhat feral grin cross Bucky’s face. He fumbles in his own movements, his stomach lurching in a way that’s not common but is, at the same time, all too familiar, and Natasha takes that moment to sweep his legs out from under him. The lurching in his stomach intensifies and he hits the ground with a thud, the air knocked out of his lungs, and stares up at her, a bit dazed.

 

“Oh fuck,” he says, the thought encompassing so much of his mental faculties that he can’t keep it in.

 

Natasha quirks an eyebrow in question, because she knows a tiny fall like that wouldn’t even rattle him, but he’s still lying there, struck dumb. After a moment, he gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head—not a _no,_ but more of an _I’ll tell you later (in private)—_ and she moves on, holding out a hand and hauling him up, looking like it doesn’t take any effort for her to pull his heavy body off the floor.

 

God, he loves her.

 

The problem is, he’s pretty sure he’s in love with Bucky Barnes, too.

 

***

 

“I’m in love with Bucky Barnes,” he blurts out as soon as he and Natasha are seated on the couch in their quarters. She’s leaned into the corner, her body turned to face him, and she barely reacts.

 

She knows Clint falls halfway in love and then back out with pretty much every person who treats him even halfway decently or makes any overture of friendship. He’s done this with pretty much every Avenger by now, fallen not quite in love but past the simplicity of a crush with Steve’s stubbornness, Tony’s veiled kindness and humor, Thor’s booming laugh, Sam’s warmth, Bruce’s quiet and comforting presence. So when he fell half in love with Bucky the first time he saw him shoot on the range (he has a competence kink a mile wide and he’s not ashamed of it), he didn’t think twice about it. Without exception, the feelings always faded into the warmth of friendship and found-family, and it never mattered that for a few weeks Clint had to control himself so he didn’t follow the object of his affection around with hearts in his eyes.

 

Clint has only fallen truly, deeply in love with two (now three) people in his life: Phil Coulson and Natasha Romanoff. He and Phil were never anything more or less than family, because the power imbalance of dating his handler was too wide for either of them to make a move. But he and Natasha have been in a relationship since the Battle of New York.

 

Natasha loves him, but she isn’t _in love_ with him. She’s never fallen in love with anyone, never felt so much as a crush. Natasha doesn’t believe in romantic love, for herself; what she does believe in is _trust,_ which to both of them is so much more important. She’s attracted to him, and she trusts him, and she loves him in her own way more than she loves anyone else in the world. For a long time, being best friends and platonic soulmates was enough—Clint, for all his feelings, could have spent the rest of his life by her side in that capacity and been happy—but after she almost lost him one too many times, and after they lost Phil, and after aliens tried to take over the world and the universe became that much bigger, Natasha had decided that maybe the risk of trying to be in a relationship was worth the potential reward.

 

Three years on, they’re going strong. People (mostly Tony) stopped calling them lovebirds and other ridiculous things when Natasha threatened, just with her eyes, to split them open from throat to groin, and they settled into an easy partnership that was barely any different from the way they’d been before (but with the added bonus of mind-blowing sex).

 

So Clint is—understandably, he feels—worried that this will be what throws a wrench in things. He’s too much of a human disaster to keep a good thing going; he has no idea how this very, _very_ good thing in his life has lasted this long without him irrevocably fucking it up somehow. But he would never have tried to keep it from Natasha, because communication is important to any relationship, and also she can pretty much read his mind, so he couldn’t have kept it from her if he tried.

 

All of this is spiraling through this head—the panic is rising, fuck, when he hasn’t had a panic attack in months—when Natasha cuts through all his mental noise and says, “You should tell him.”

 

He looks over, afraid of what he’ll see on her face, but her eyes are clear and she’s giving him a soft half-smile.

 

“I can’t _tell him,”_ Clint protests once the words sink in. “For one, I’m dating you, and I’m happy with the way things are,” he tells her. “For another, he’s still sorting himself out, he doesn’t need my feelings making everything more complicated.”

 

Natasha rolls her eyes at him, and it shouldn’t put him at ease, but it does. “Feelings are always inconvenient,” she tells him, because she actually believes that. He can’t really refute it, which is annoying, because he may feel things _a lot,_ but he likes feeling things, thank you very much. “Let him decide what he can handle.”

 

“That still doesn’t mean anything,” Clint argues, “because _I’m in a relationship with you.”_

 

She lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug. “So?”

 

Clint’s eyes narrow, because he knows from experience that arguing with Natasha is a futile effort, even when he’s pretty sure he’s in the right. “People in serious relationships usually don’t try to be with other people,” he points out.

 

“Are we usual people?” she asks him.

 

“Well, no,” he admits. “But I love you,” he says, because he can’t stop feeling like it would be a betrayal of some sort to tell Bucky about his feelings when he’s with Natasha. It feels like he’s saying she’s not enough, when she’s _so much more_ than enough for him. When she’s _everything._

 

Her eyes soften, and this is one of the reasons he loves her so much, because she knows what he’s saying when he can’t find the right words. “I know,” she tells him, and he thinks, _thanks Han Solo,_ but he doesn’t say it, because this is a serious moment. He can be an adult—sometimes. “I know that you do not love me less just because you love someone else.”

 

He feels like her words, her understanding, have punched him in the chest, stealing the air from his lungs more effectively than any physical impact could. He can’t quite silence the voice inside him saying that it’s wrong, that he’s wired wrong, but he has Natasha’s love and trust and acceptance to fight against it, and it’s almost enough.

 

She’s kind enough to ignore the tears in his eyes. It’s a weakness he wouldn’t trust to anyone else.

 

“I still don’t see what the point of telling him is,” he grouses.

 

She rolls her eyes and shifts to put an arm over his shoulder and draw him closer to her, enveloping him in her warmth. She’s deceptively soft, and he takes comfort in the familiar feel of her body against his.

 

***

 

Bucky knows Steve is about to say something he’s not going to like when Steve sits him down, a warm hand on his shoulder, and looks at him with that earnest but hesitant expression. Historically, it means Bucky’s fucking up being normal in some way and Steve is going to awkwardly but sincerely power through explaining it to him.

 

But the thing is, Bucky usually knows when this is coming; even before he started to get a handle on acting like a person, rather than an asset, he could tell when things he did made people uncomfortable or when things he said didn’t convey the meaning he intended. He knew he was fucking up, but he didn’t know how to fix it until Steve unfailingly sat him down and talked him through it, reteaching him how to be a person one step at a time.

 

But this time, Bucky has no clue what this could be about. He’s friendly with everyone in the tower at this point, to varying degrees of “friendly”: he and Clint get into shooting competitions; he and Thor sometimes spar; he and Natasha chat quietly in Russian while they clean their weapons; he and Bruce drink tea together on late nights when he can’t sleep and Bruce is up working on a project; he and Tony compete to see who can come up with a nickname that the other hates more. He’s gotten pretty good at reading these people—with the possible exception of Natasha, who is as inscrutable on her worst day as he is on his best—and he hasn’t noticed anything amiss.

 

“Bucky,” Steve starts, but then he stops, his eyes crinkling a little in annoyance and concentration.

 

Bucky nods to encourage him to continue.

 

“Clint and Natasha are dating,” Steve blurts out.

 

Bucky blinks. “Yeah, pal, I’d noticed that.” As if he would ever be so unobservant as to miss _that._

 

Steve’s eyes narrow. “You did?”

 

Bucky laughs. “Of course.”

 

Steve’s eyes narrow further. “And you’re… okay with that?”

 

Bucky shrugs. “Doesn’t much matter how I feel about it, it’s their relationship,” he says philosophically. “But they seem to make a good pair.” He wouldn’t know much about that, but he thinks that if he had a relationship, he’d want it to be like theirs. Quiet and steady.

 

“Oh-kay,” Steve says, drawing out the syllables. “You know you can talk to me about anything, right?”

 

“You got it, champ,” Bucky says agreeably.

 

Steve stares at him for a few more long moments. He looks as pole-axed now as Bucky felt at the beginning of their conversation.

 

“We done here?” he asks. “Only, I’m supposed to have met Barton on the range five minutes ago.”

 

Steve retracts his hand from Bucky’s shoulder and waves him away without a word. It’s weird behavior, but whatever, Bucky’s not 100% at reading the nuances of people’s behavior these days anyway.

 

***

 

It isn’t, Bucky muses as he heads to the range, that he doesn’t know where Steve is coming from, at least in part. After all, his extensive therapy is all about getting in touch with his emotions and accepting them as a valid part of his identity. He’s not so clueless anymore that he doesn’t know how he feels about Clint and Natasha.

 

Clint is just… a disaster. His blond hair is always a mess and he wears more purple than a small child could get away with, but he’s funny and sarcastic and magnetic. Bucky can’t tear his eyes away from Clint, and more than all of that, Clint makes him want to _smile._ Clint was the first person to make him laugh, back when everyone was still scared of Bucky losing control—Bucky included—and Clint made a stupid sex joke about the metal arm because he hadn’t had coffee yet and so had even less of a filter than normal (or at least that’s the excuse he went with). From then on, it’s like Clint’s made it his personal mission to make Bucky laugh as often as possible; how could Bucky _not_ be helplessly in love with him?

 

With Natasha it’s different. She calls him James, even now that he feels enough like Bucky to not want to crawl out of his skin when someone calls him by it, because she knows the power of a given name and the weight of people’s expectations. She’s never expected him to be anything less than he is. She always acknowledged, in the early days, when he snuck a weapon around Steve’s vigilant guard—just a quick glance of her eyes to let him know that she knew. But she never told; when he asked her, eventually, she told him that she understood the need to be able to protect yourself. It went unspoken that she was willing to step in to protect everyone from him if anything had gone wrong, that she might be the only person capable of doing so. They didn’t discuss the risk that she took, allowing him to be armed for his peace of mind, but he did thank her by, the first time he was allowed out of the tower without Steve watching over his shoulder, months later, finding a small Russian shop that had entirely illegal imported vodka and buying her a bottle. She smiled at him, just a small tilt on one corner of her mouth, her eyes twinkling lightly at him, and that was the moment he realized he was well and truly fucked.

 

So he’s not in love with one or the other of them; he’s in love with two utterly unattainable people, because they’re in a relationship with each other. It doesn’t bother him like he thinks it should, though, because they’re so happy together that it couldn’t. Why would he begrudge the two people he loves that kind of happiness? It’s not like he doesn’t have more than he could ever want in their friendship, after all; who is he to ask for more?

 

So he understands Steve’s concern, and the only thing he hopes is that Steve only picked up on Bucky’s feelings because he knows him so well.

 

When he gets to the range, he’s not expecting to find Clint sitting against the wall outside rather than geared up and making impossibly shots with his bow. Clint’s posture is slumped, a bit, and he’s staring sightlessly at the wall—it’s not a good sign, all in all. Bucky’s close enough to touch him, and he doesn’t seem to have noticed; as much as Clint acts like he’s oblivious, Bucky knows how to spot when someone’s aware of every person in a room, the side effect of being a spy and an assassin.

 

He nudges Clint with the toe of his shoe. “You alright there, Barton?” he asks.

 

Clint blinks up at him a few times before his eyes actually focus. “Of course,” he says, and it’s anything but true.

 

Bucky feels his eyebrows go up. “Want to try that again?”

 

Clint sighs, closes his eyes, and visibly steels himself for… something. “I’m in love with you.”

 

Bucky feels like he’s lost his grip on reality, just a bit; he hasn’t felt like this in months. Everything is hazy, and he can’t feel the air in his lungs anymore, much less hear the words that Clint’s mouth is rapidly forming. He could lip-read, if he had the mental capacity to do it, but he doesn’t; he’s just… lost.

 

Then everything rushes back into startling clarity, in time for him to hear Clint, now risen and backing away from him slightly, say, “…no big deal, pretend I didn’t say anything, I’m,” and he gestures vaguely over his shoulder, turning to go. His face looks calm but the tips of his ears are bright red, poking out around his hair, and Bucky’s arm reaches out to stop him without him even thinking about it.

 

“What,” he says, because he can’t understand what’s happening.

 

Clint’s frozen, half turned away. “It’s nothing,” he says, in a way that makes it clear that it’s much more than nothing.

 

He doesn’t say _you can’t be._ He can’t fathom someone being in love with him, but he knows that Clint would never, could never, lie about something so monumental. Instead, he asks, “But… Natasha?”

 

Clint’s starting to look vaguely miserable, but it’s got nothing on the turmoil Bucky’s currently feeling, so he ignores the impulse to let Clint go if it will make him feel better. “I still love her,” he says. “We’re still together.”

 

“Then what…” he starts, but that’s not the right question, not yet. “Does she know?”

 

Clint nods. “She told me to tell you.”

 

Bucky tries to wrap his mind around that. “Why?”

 

Clint laughs, and it sounds wrecked rather than happy. “Fuck if I know.”

 

Bucky thinks about their options, for a moment, before settling on the one that makes the most sense to him. “Then let’s go talk to her.”

 

***

 

Natasha isn’t expecting Clint back quite so soon, nor quite so miserable, which means she’s miscalculated somewhere. James is right on his heels, though, so she has a chance to fix whatever they’ve broken sooner rather than later. She allows them to settle in on the couch, moving to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee to soothe Clint’s nerves.

 

She considers them from the other room, aware that they both can feel her assessing gaze and not trying to hide it in any way. James is relaxed in a way that’s too precise, too careful, to be natural. Clint is slumped over his knees, disconsolate, looking about ten seconds away from having a panic attack or bursting into tears.

 

She’s unbearably fond of the both of them, even though she fails to understand what’s so difficult about navigating requited feelings.

 

She busies herself with the coffees—James takes his the same way she prefers hers, with a splash of milk and half a spoon of sugar—and then carries the mugs into the other room, setting them down on the table without bothering to care about staining the wood (it’s not like Clint hasn’t left coffee rings all over it by now anyway).

 

She’s not going to be the first to talk, so she sips at her coffee and waits for one of them to say something.

 

“Why did you tell Clint to tell me he’s in love with me?” James asks after five minutes and twenty seconds, approximately.

 

She tilts her head, considering him. “You didn’t tell him,” she realizes. She’s surprised, and a little bit proud that Clint wasn’t the one to make something so simple this difficult.

 

Clint has shifted next to her, paying attention but clearly lost. “Tell me what?”

 

Natasha gazes coolly at James, unwilling to say it for him.

 

James gazes back at her for a few moments before shifting his eyes past her, to Clint. “That I’m in love with you, too.”

 

She can feel Clint’s body go stiff, although she’s still watching James’ face, the micro-expressions she’s more than adept at reading.

 

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” James says, and he’s looking at Clint but it’s clear that he’s talking to her.

 

She huffs, part laugh and part frustration. “I am not so jealous as to keep him all to myself. He is free to love whomever he chooses.”

 

James’ eyes narrow; she can see the rapid turning of his thoughts. “What am I not understanding?” he finally asks.

 

“There is no rule that someone cannot be in multiple relationships,” Natasha tells him. “Just because it is not convention does not mean it is impossible.”

 

She can feel James struggling to not say aloud that he’s afraid of doing anything that isn’t considered “normal,” for fear of alienating the people he cares about. She’s prepared to wait him out.

 

Clint has no such patience. “It’s called polyamory,” he says to James, and then to Natasha, “I looked it up.”

 

James seems overwhelmed. “I don’t know what to think,” he says.

 

Natasha nods once. “Take time. There is no rush.” She finally turns her gaze on Clint when she says that, a warning, one that he looks offended by.

 

“Take all the time you need,” he says, because he’s always better than she expects him to be.

 

James nods and rises, leaving quietly.

 

Clint lets out an explosive sigh. “That could have gone better.”

 

Natasha shrugs. “It could have gone worse,” she tells him. “He’ll be back.”

 

Clint looks dubious. “If you say so,” he says skeptically, but she lets that slide. She leans into his side instead, allowing him to wrap his arm around her shoulders, tucking her head under his chin. She can hear his heart beat, soothing and steady, and closes her eyes.

 

Everything will be fine.

 

***

 

She is not even slightly surprised when there is a knock on the door less than four hours later. There are two options for who it could be: either James has figured out where he stands, and he’s come to discuss it with them, or James has told Steve, and Steve is here to shout protectively about things he does not understand, because Steve is the kind of man who will do anything for the people he loves without considering that maybe his interference isn’t necessary or particularly welcome.

 

 She leaves a surprised Clint on the couch, where they have been watching a documentary about rescue dogs finding homes, and goes to answer the door herself, because if it is Steve, then she is more suited to bear the brunt of his temper. After all, she engineered this, for all that she does not understand why it is so difficult to navigate. Maybe it’s men, or the fact that they’re all emotionally stunted, or the simple fact that she doesn’t understand anything when romance comes into it.

 

She pulls open the door and, to her relief, finds James standing there, hands shoved deep in the front pocket on his hoodie. His eyes are clear and determined, however, when they meet hers.

 

“It’s not just Clint,” he says, and it takes Natasha a fraction of a second to parse that, but then… oh.

 

“You should come in,” she says, opening the door wider and stepping back to allow him space.

 

This time he takes a seat in the worn leather armchair that Clint found at a thrift store somewhere in Brooklyn. It’s Natasha’s favorite chair, but she allows him to keep it for now, because it’s got the best angle from which to face she and Clint on the couch.

 

“I do not feel romantic attraction,” she tells James. It’s not something she tells people, because it’s nothing they need to know, and it’s something that tends to make people consider her broken or less than human. After all, what makes people human if not love?

 

Many things, Natasha could tell them, but she wouldn’t, because those kinds of people aren’t willing to change their minds.

 

James Barnes is not one of those people. He may not understand right away, but he will never treat her differently for exposing a facet of herself to him.

 

She _trusts_ him, not in the same way she trusts Clint, but in a way that is no less important. It’s the only reason she thinks that maybe, just maybe, this could work.

 

James tilts his head, just the barest amount. “What does that mean?”

 

“She’s not in love with me,” Clint says, and where normally she would be annoyed at anyone for daring to try to speak for her, here she is only relieved. He knows better than to speak for her, after all, but he also knows just how uncomfortable this conversation makes her. “She loves me, and she’s attracted to me, but she’s not in love with me. Not like I am with her. With you.”

 

James seems to be contemplating that. “But you’re together.” He says it like an irrefutable fact, even as it’s partially a question.

 

“Yes,” Natasha agrees. “Our relationship is built on something more important than love.”

 

Clint rolls his eyes at that, but he’s smiling, too.

 

“Oh?” James asks, sounding intrigued.

 

“Trust,” she tells him.

 

James’ expression does not change from open and interested, but his eyes light up. “I trust you,” he tells her, so easily that she almost cannot believe it. From a man who has so little reason to ever trust anyone again,  it is an impossible gift.

 

She loves him for the way he says it, with no expectation that she will return the sentiment. He just wants her to know, in her own language, how he feels.

 

“I trust you,” she returns.

 

His face breaks into a grin, like the sun peeking out through the clouds—just a glance of something bigger, but brilliant nonetheless.

 

He turns to Clint and says, “I trust you too, for the record,” and it’s Clint’s turn to smile.

 

“So, are we doing this?” Clint asks, impatient as always.

 

Natasha feels that she has made her opinion on the matter more than clear. But she nods, once, for the benefit of her boys, who sometimes need things to be made more than clear.

 

“Yeah,” James agrees, his voice quiet and almost reverent. “Of course, if you’ll have me.”

 

Clint surges up from the couch, stopping just short of James, hands hovering inches away from his face. “Can I kiss you?”

 

James leans into Clint’s hand and nods. “Yeah, yes. Please.”

 

Natasha knows how Clint kisses, can feel the ghost of it on her lips if she closes her eyes. But watching Clint kiss James is something new, something amazing. It’s something she wants to see every day for the foreseeable future.

 

When they pull apart, she can see that James’ eyes are dark and disbelieving, and she doesn’t have to be able to see Clint’s face to know what he looks like—wrecked and hopeful and happy all at once.

 

Natasha’s never been in love, but she loves them all the same.

 

She shifts on the couch and they both turn to look at her, and she thinks, _yes, this._ She feels herself smile wickedly, watches the way their throats work in tandem in response. “My turn.”

 

***

 

They agree, sated and curled around each other in a bed that’s big enough to comfortable fit three people, not to tell anyone right away, but not to keep it a secret either.

 

That lasts until the next morning, when Clint wakes up to both (both!) of his partners missing, leaving him no excuse to linger in bed. He pulls on sweatpants and doesn’t bother with a shirt, bypassing the empty coffeepot in his kitchen to head to the communal floor, where there’s always either a full pot of coffee or one brewing.

 

He ignores everyone at the table in favor of grabbing a cup of coffee before wandering back over. All of the chairs are occupied (they only extend the table and bring in more chairs for team dinners); so, half asleep, he just nudges at Bucky’s side until he takes the hint and scoots back enough for Clint to drop into his lap, pressing an absent kiss to his shoulder and then downing half his coffee and burning his tongue cells off (whatever, they’ll grow back).

 

It takes him until he finishes the cup to figure out that everyone’s staring at them, Bucky’s arm looped lazily around his waist, fingers splayed across his stomach under his shirt. Natasha looks amused, but Steve, Sam, and Tony all look blown away.

 

Clint just rolls his eyes at them and leverages himself to his feet, set on obtaining more coffee. He needs it before _this_ conversation.

 

“What just happened?” Tony asks. Leave it to Tony Stark to break any awkward silence.

 

“My boyfriend decided to use me as a chair before abandoning me for coffee,” Bucky says.

 

Natasha laughs.

 

“What?” asks Steve.

 

“When?” asks Tony.

 

“Congratulations, guys,” says Sam before taking another bite of his omelet, and yeah, Sam is Clint’s new official favorite.

 

“Thanks,” Bucky says, and he rolls his eyes at the other two.

 

Neither he nor Natasha looks inclined to continue the conversation or answer questions, which is fine with Clint. He grabs two mugs and fills them with coffee, fixing up one with sugar and milk, and sets them on the table before sitting on Bucky again.

 

Natasha’s eyes are warm from where she’s looking at them from across the table, and Bucky’s arm is warm around his waist. Clint’s happy—God, so happy—to have this.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy birthday to [claraxarton,](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaraxBarton/pseuds/ClaraxBarton) who asked for ot3 fic. Also great thanks to [kangofu-cb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kangofu_CB/pseuds/Kangofu_CB) for assuring me that this fic was not secretly terrible. 
> 
> This was my first time writing for this triad, so I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!


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